Editor's File: Drawing a line — News and opinion are siblings with different personalities

Before he left newspapers in 2005 to help lead a good government group, Zack Stalberg was the editor of the Philadelphia Daily News, a feisty, smart tabloid that covered the nation's fifth-largest city, a tough town where Stalberg practiced a form of tough love for more than three decades.

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Posted Oct. 20, 2013 at 12:01 AM

Posted Oct. 20, 2013 at 12:01 AM

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Before he left newspapers in 2005 to help lead a good government group, Zack Stalberg was the editor of the Philadelphia Daily News, a feisty, smart tabloid that covered the nation's fifth-largest city, a tough town where Stalberg practiced a form of tough love for more than three decades.

His Daily News was a crusader in the old-fashioned manner that big city papers were long ago. As a reporter, he once got the legendary and powerful Mayor Frank Rizzo to take a lie detector test, which Rizzo failed, over the peddling of city jobs. Stalberg led a drive against the despised wage tax Pennsylvanians paid for the privilege of working for someone else. His newspaper called it "the tax we love to hate."

The Daily News did not aspire to neutrality and objectivity in its news coverage as much as it aspired to getting the goods on Philadelphia's legendarily corrupt politicians and refusing to genuflect to anyone, no matter how powerful. It made a lot of enemies ... and a lot of friends. And it was fun to read because there was an edge to it, along with a point of view.

Many successful tabloids traditionally have done something like it. Think of the Boston Herald.

But most traditional daily newspapers and network television news outlets say they aspire to a different model: neutrality and objectivity in how they cover the news. They attempt to give their readers a set of facts devoid of any political motive, and they call that objectivity.

But real objectivity is difficult.

The men and women who decide what is news, who report the stories, who write the headlines, who take and edit the photos are human beings with their own set of assumptions and their own points of view about the events and issues of the day. That is most obvious on cable news outlets like Fox News, which champions conservatives causes and values while relentlessly marketing itself as "fair and balanced," and MSNBC, which is Fox News' liberal equivalent.

I mention this in light of the around-the-clock coverage of the recent shutdown of the federal government and the near-default on federal debt.

In story after story, both in print and on television, news organizations allowed conservatives to give their side of the story, which was to blame President Obama and the Democrats for forcing the shutdown by refusing to renegotiate the Affordable Care Act that was signed into law after its approval by Congress and which was the central argument of Obama's re-election in 2012.

(The Democrats, meanwhile, accused the Republican far right of trying to subvert the will of the electorate and extort the American people).

I am not sure that journalists do anyone a favor by giving equal treatment to ideas that are inherently unequal. In 2011, you might remember, polls showed that nearly half of Republicans believed Obama was not born in the United States. Should their contention that Obama was foreign-born have been treated by credible news organizations as anything other than the widely held fiction that it was?

We see it in the debate over global warming, where the overwhelming consensus among scientists is that human behavior is at least partly to blame for climate change. Should the press give equal weight to the arguments of the few scientists who believe otherwise and perhaps to give that minority viewpoint more credibility than it deserves with the result being continued inaction by the international community?

These are not easy questions.

And none of this is to suggest that people who work as journalists do not have points of view. For example, I have three adopted children, each a part of my life because an unmarried young woman courageously decided to put her child up for adoption rather than abort the pregnancy or attempt to raise the child on her own. So I have a hard time being objective about abortion or about the many issues surrounding teen pregnancy.

But when deciding on either a news story or an editorial position related to either topic, I try to separate my personal feelings from my professional judgment in making decisions about what we cover and what we have to say about those topics editorially.

When it is time to say what we think, we do so as clearly and persuasively as we can on our Opinion Page. And then we welcome others to agree or disagree with us.

And that's how it's supposed to work.

Bob Unger is the Editor and Associate Publisher of SouthCoast Media Group, the publisher of The Standard-Times and SouthCoastToday.com. He can be reached by email at runger@s-t.com or by phone at 508-979-4430.